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[signalfire]

I really love the engine and the new approaches you are taking to it.

I was wondering how you are getting your terrain data? Is it procedural or taken from different sources?

Keep up the good work

[cameni]

We are using real elevation data of various resolutions, that are initially processed (remapped and wavelet-compressed) so they are better usable for LOD management and streaming. Thus up to a certain resolution (currently ~76m but it can be arbitrary) it uses real elevations, and the detail below that resolution is generated procedurally.

[signalfire]

Nice, are you planning on having an procedural terrain?

Are you using any tools to edit the terrain data? Also would you mind sharing where you are getting your terrain sources? I saw that you were using Google Earth was the data taken from google maps or were you just mapping the game co-ordinates to google maps?

[cameni]

You mean a purely procedural terrain for artificial planets? We have our ideas there too, but we want to work on the real planets initially - it's more in line with our further plans. You are probably aware of Infinity who are doing artificial planets. Our approach would be different though - we want to generate continental plates, mountain ridges etc as a first step and then continue with procedural refinement  in our usual manner.

For the sources of terrain data look here.
We aren't using Google Earth, rather we were showing embedded Google Maps synchronized with in-game camera. Otherwise no data from Google products were used.

[AWM Mars]

Anyone else not see the last sentence of the above post...?

using Google Earth, rather we were showing embedded Google Maps synchronized with in-game camera. Otherwise

then nothing, I do see what appears to be the tops of letters underneath. No wait, now I added my post, the last line now shows..

[Edding3000]

You mean a purely procedural terrain for artificial planets? We have our ideas there too, but we want to work on the real planets initially - it's more in line with our further plans. You are probably aware of Infinity who are doing artificial planets. Our approach would be different though - we want to generate continental plates, mountain ridges etc as a first step and then continue with procedural refinement  in our usual manner.

For the sources of terrain data look here.
We aren't using Google Earth, rather we were showing embedded Google Maps synchronized with in-game camera. Otherwise no data from Google products were used.

I know vterrain as a source of links to terrain data, but can you say what dataset you actually use for outerra? I know it's 'recompiled' (can't find a better word) for outerra, but whats the actual base dataset? And do you stream it from your own servers or is it streamed from disc? If it's streamed from disc, daaaamn, that's a large download! if not, dannnggg your'e gonna need a huge server to stream it when the demo is released!

[cameni]

I know vterrain as a source of links to terrain data, but can you say what dataset you actually use for outerra? I know it's 'recompiled' (can't find a better word) for outerra, but whats the actual base dataset? And do you stream it from your own servers or is it streamed from disc? If it's streamed from disc, daaaamn, that's a large download! if not, dannnggg your'e gonna need a huge server to stream it when the demo is released!

Hmm let me remember .. I think we used SRTM 30+ for water, SRTM 90m for land. There are some data sets with better resolution, we'd like to use some for mountains where it matters most, but so far each had ugly bugs.

We have a compiled dataset on our server, and Outerra has a built-in bittorrent client that it uses to get the data. I described it here.